Yesterday’s report The Economy After Brexit by Economists For Brexit includes a section by Tim Congdon on EU regulation, essentially blaming all the evils of the British economy on excessive red tape and inferring that our economy could do so much better if it were unshackled from it all. The conclusion of the booklet suggests that…
I’ve written before about how the European Union provides the best opportunity to prevent the exploitation of workers who are temporarily posted to other EU countries (and thus the undercutting of the existing workforce.) The best avenue for such action would be revising the EU’s Posted Workers’ Directive, so we were very pleased when the…
Last week the European Commission suddenly woke up to the needs of working people. After years of almost no initiatives in the social and employment fields, reinforcing the perception of the EU as just a business club, we got something to deal with the pay of workers temporarily sent to work in another country (on which…
On Tuesday (8 March) the European Commission announced a long-waited revision of the twenty year-old Posted Workers Directive, which regulates the entitlements of workers sent by their employer to another EU country on a short-term project. Think of the characters in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet – they would be the kind of workers that this directive sought to…
Last summer, I blogged about the government’s Balance of Competences Review and the first batch of reports. I concluded then that the reports must have been disappointing for Conservative eurosceptic MPs who were eagerly awaiting irrefutable evidence that powers devolved to Brussels must immediately be repatriated in the national interest. A year has gone by and,…
From today until Sunday the whole of Europe will go to the polls to elect the members of the European Parliament. There has been a steady decline in voter turnout since elections were first held in 1979 and turnout in the UK has historically been one of the lowest in the EU. Yet this remains…
Summer is finally here. Some are packing their swim suits, and others are dreading the scales: everyone knows that they don’t always show what you want to see. This week some in the government had that familiar feeling of disappointment. Last summer the government embarked on a review of EU powers, to be concluded in 2014, known…